In spite of the decisiveness of the words, ‘I know that I am the heir to large property,’ it is obvious, from the ensuing words, that, as his twenty-first year neared its end, the poet realized vividly how small his knowledge was of the nature and magnitude of the patrimony, about which he had written and spoken so much, with equal looseness and boastfulness. He begs his lawyer to say whether he has any doubt that he is the heir to a large landed property. ‘Have you,’ he asks of the man of business, who was his relative, and had formerly been in some degree cognizant of the affairs of the Shelleys, though he may never have been greatly in the confidence of either Sir Bysshe or Sir Bysshe’s son, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ He would not have asked in this nervous style for his attorney’s ‘certain knowledge on the subject,’ had he not been himself painfully in want of such knowledge. Seventeen months since, he had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an estate of 6000_l._ per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find himself heir to nothing,--the fool of a fool’s paradise,--the dupe of a long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn of penury. Of course, any such state of alarm was transient. He had sufficient grounds for believing himself the heir (somehow or other) to considerable property. At the same time, he was painfully alive to his need of precise information respecting the property. Four or five days later (21st June, 1813), after receiving a letter of reassuring information from Mr. Medwin, he wrote to the lawyer, ‘Depend upon it, that no artifice of my father’s shall induce me to take a life-interest in the estate;’--words, seeming to indicate that the lawyer (who had lent him money, and was otherwise interested in encouraging him to surrender nothing of his estate) had already been instructing him to disappoint his grandfather’s and father’s design to compass the re-entailment of the property. ‘I feel with sufficient force,’ the writer continues, in respect to the proposal that he should take a life-interest in the estate, ‘that I should not by such conduct be guilty alone of injustice to myself, but to those who have assisted me by kind offices and advice during my adversity:’--_i.e._ those who had lent him money during his minority.